Chapter Text
Prologue: "...never working with the Imperial Russian Security Service again."
Napoleon woke to the symphony of aches and pains that generally results from throwing oneself out of a rapidly moving car on a mountain road. Beyond the aches, however, someone or something was licking his left hand —which also hurt, though the licks did soothe it, a little bit. Something in the nature of the touch let Napoleon know, before he even opened his eyes, that this was Pasha, Illya's arctic fox dæmon, telling him that Illya was up and on his way to finding him.
Napoleon's own dæmon, currently a large warm weight on his feet, now began to stir, shaking herself as she stood, to dislodge the scattering of leaves and dirt which they'd both acquired in their tumble down the hill. Saphina was as fastidious as her counterpart and hated having anything marring her sleek, black panther's coat.
Slowly, using the hand that didn't hurt, Napoleon began to lever himself up and take in his surroundings. It seemed he'd fetched up against a tree, possibly head first, halfway down a steep, leaf littered hillside. Far above him he could see the battered guard rail of the road they'd been travelling on, and further along to the left the place where the car had broken through.
"There you are," Illya's voice came from behind him and downslope. "Excellent extemporaneous camouflage, though possibly superfluous, given that our former 'guides' are all dead."
"Well that's saved us a bit of trouble," Napoleon said with a grimace, tenderly locating the goose-egg on the back of his skull and determining that it was no more than that. "I'm telling you right now, we are never working with the Russian Imperial Security Service again."
"You'll get no argument from me," Illya said, reaching out to help Napoleon to his feet. "Say, what happened to your hand?"
"It hurts," commented Saphina in a pained voice. "More than it should."
Napoleon had already noticed that his hand ached badly, but assumed that he'd hit it, or possibly broken it, striking something on the way down the hill. He hadn't examined it closely yet, but now that he did he saw that it was swollen and darkening in color, and that there was a pair of parallel slices over the back of it, around two inches long. The memory returned in a flash at the sight, of one of their captors' dæmons —a viper of some sort— reaching across, fangs outthrust, in an attempt to bite Napoleon as he left the out-of-control and speeding car. Apparently it had succeeded, to the point of breaking Napoleon's skin, at any rate.
"Sergei's viper, I think," Napoleon replied, carefully testing his left hand for broken bones or any other type of injury. He found none.
"You're saying that another man's dæmon bit you?" Illya asked a touch incredulously. One person's dæmon almost never touches another person —the violation was unspeakable. There were exceptions, of course, but generally only for the most extreme situations or the most intimate relationships. The fact that Illya's Pasha did occasionally touch Napoleon and that Napoleon's Saphina did occasionally touch Illya was something neither one of them discussed.
The question of whether a dæmon with the form of a venomous animal would actually be effectively venomous had never crossed Napoleon's mind before. Nonetheless, Napoleon knew what a poisonous snakebite looked like. What was happening to his hand looked a lot like that.
"It was just as I was diving out of the car," Napoleon said, trying to remember exactly what had happened in those last confusing moments.
"Perhaps," Saphina continued thoughtfully, "he knew that the driver was dead already, and probably figured he was done-for himself."
"A last desperate, act," Illya mused. "I suppose that's possible."
"If there was ever a situation in which a dæmon might be poisonous," Saphina reflected, "that might just be it."
Illya stepped back now to look Napoleon over, assessing, just as Napoleon had done for himself. Aside from the usual assortment of bruises and stiff joints, nothing else seemed badly out of order, so the four of them made their way across the wooded hillside till they met up with the descending road.
Illya had suggested that if they stayed on this little-used road they'd probably, eventually, run into an abandoned gamekeeper's cottage or some other old empty building where they could lay low and recover for a day or two. Saphina advised that they let Illya lead for now, trusting that whatever other details might be important, their partner would see to them. Napoleon had no idea what instincts the man was following, taking various turnings from among the narrow mountain tracks. Overall they seemed to be going downhill, for which Napoleon was grateful.
Once, when they passed close to a cold mountain stream, Illya tore off a bit of his shirt to soak in the icy water and wrap around Napoleon's hand, and Napoleon had nodded in the affirmative when Illya had asked if it was better. It was, but to such a small degree that it hardly made any difference, and an hour or two later the heat from his fevered arm had driven all the water out of the cloth. Napoleon badly wanted to sit and rest, but Saphina reminded him that once he'd stopped it would be impossible to get going again. After a time, it was all Napoleon could do to stay upright and put one foot in front of the other. Whatever of his focus remained was taken up with not thinking how much his hand, and now his arm too, hurt. The rest of the trip passed in a fog.
Napoleon had finally become aware, in a vague way, that the day's light was fading, when, to his utter shock, they stopped. They'd come to a clearing, a sloping meadow scattered with a variety of wildflowers all tinted beautifully by the long angled, golden light of the setting sun. At the bottom of the clearing there ran a stretch of river, whose splashing song Napoleon could hear from where Illya was settling him at the base of a tree.
"I'm just going to have a word with these people," Illya said. "See if I can't impose ourselves upon their hospitality."
What people? Napoleon thought, then felt Saphina's nudge against his shoulder. "Look there", she said directing Napoleon's gaze to where something unnaturally colorful could be seen between a copse of trees at the river bank. Caravans! Napoleon realized. Gyptians Caravans!
A band of Gyptians would represent perhaps the closest thing to civilization, here in the rugged Carpathian mountains, for hundreds of miles in any direction. It would seem that Solo's luck had struck again.